


From the diary of Edie Fitcher

by smileodon



Category: Dracula - Bram Stoker
Genre: Gen, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 21:15:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smileodon/pseuds/smileodon
Summary: As written by Renfield's aunt, in the days preceding his institutionalization.





	From the diary of Edie Fitcher

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hyenateeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyenateeth/gifts).



_From a blue-bound journal, entries undated. The handwriting is precise and spidery, the ink black, lightening to brown at the edges._

\--I write now at my own desk for the last time in what may be some weeks, for tomorrow I go to my sister's house at her request. She has asked my help as R (her husband) is very ill, and she now also unwell, and my nephew, though he lives still in his father's house, has his work to go to as a clerk and only a single pair of hands. Things must go ill indeed if she will ask for help, for we are both proud, and less close now than we once were. Perhaps this will be to the good?

 

\--Such a house this is! Such a mess of strangeness and pain. And Anne! After so many years being gently reminded of my Failures as a Woman in never securing a husband it is hard indeed to see where womanly devotion has brought her. She does not speak of it, but mercury does not lie. As his teeth green into decay I worry and watch for hers to turn. My sister, whatever her faults, has done no evil to deserve this. Thankfully? R has now taken largely to his bed, his mind grown near as ill as his body.

RM, my nephew, takes it hard, living with them through it all while I only come lately, he is as changed a man as his father, though not I think of any such disease - indeed he abhors disease now with a strange fury, and abhors the mercury too, for he whispered to me once 'It is a dead thing, metal, and must only hasten the end."  
My sister will not hear it, she must hope, else she would have nothing to keep her going on. And he seems to have rallied, though we all of us know it will not last.

 

\--I must get a cat, when I am home again for a proper stretch, as now I am only in and out, and there is an unfortunate mousey odour about the back sitting room and droppings have been found belowstairs. A's house strangely free of the little monsters, though they have no mouser there these past five years, and things are not so clean as they used - natural enough when illness must take precedence. RM says the mercury fumes must be keeping away the vermin, and indeed though there is heavy dust in less used places, I saw not a single spiderweb, even in the sickroom. But then, were I a spider, I should not care to remain either.

He argued with the doctor today, in a flurry of pages, notes he has been taking at the university library- they exploded across the sitting room, and I found myself in possession of one Paracelsus' recommendations as to the use of mumia- something to do with convicts? Dr C dismissed it all quite angrily, called it archaic nonsense, and RM departed fairly seething. I think it is like mummy dust, only- fresher, if it may be called that, and certainly no help to a dying man, whatever our ancestors may have thought. But desperation makes men grasp for even superstitious help.

 

\--I have stayed with A again tonight. Things pain her and we were wakeful, but should have heard them even had we not been, shouting and snarling and crying, like angry animals instead of men. The walls are solid here, thicker than my own, but though the words were indistinct the sound could not help but carry. I think my nephew has tried to be a good son, but now I fear there is hatred there, beside the contempt and pity I confess I have shared, and it is worse for a son watching the ultimate culmination of his father's flaws. If R were only paying for his own sins, it would still be an unjust punishment. If Anne must pay as well...

 

\--My brother in law is dead.  
We knew that it must come soon, but having lingered so long we came to expect the lingering to continue. And yet his death does not come near the worst of it- I fear we have let the life of one and the sanity of the other slip away hand in hand.  
R died in the slow hours of the night, or must have done, but A and I were in her bedchamber, and RM with his father, and it was not until morning- my God- he had been- _cutting_ away at the body- to see what life would remain, he said, to see if it were contained in the blood, or if it would run out of him mercury silver-- talking to us, all the time, matter of fact as a schoolmaster on a theory, with such a smell and such a mess of blood that Anne fainted dead away, and I came near to following. If I close my eyes, I can see the red on his hands, and on his handkerchief. I have put the writing desk against the door.

 

\--Between myself and the doctors, we have spoken to Anne, and she is agreed that RM must be sent away. It is to be an institution near the coast, well spoken of, we are told. There is a special carriage for it, and Dr C brought another doctor with him, and three very huge men, two orderlies and the driver. But he did not fight, he only wished to take his notebooks with him, the ledger that he tallies against some secret thing. And so a thing that loomed momentous and threatening was in execution more like seeing him off to an appointment, or a visit. But there is a feeling of danger nonetheless, and when the carriage had departed and I took Anne's hand both our fingers were shaking.

 

\--I have gone with her today to see him at the asylum. Never having seen one to compare, I must suppose it a good specimen of its kind; it is not a Bedlam, and the halls and rooms are clean and without overcrowding, but the hospital itself is a dreadful atmospheric place beside a decaying abbey. I cannot think it will do him good to be here, the moreso because he seems to like it. He watches the world outside, and the abbey, and his eyes turn strange and bright. Twice he lost the thread of conversation, not through madness but through what seemed sheer preoccupation.

 

\--A is failing. I do not know if it is R's loss or the disease which weighs on her more, but RM has only compounded it. For a time it seemed she had rallied, but the weather turned cold of a sudden, and the days inside and alone take a toll. England is cruel. I look for the sister I danced with in the grass by the pond, and she fades every day, eclipsed by something sad and shrunken. There are lines on both our faces, grey in both our hair, but now Anne looks truly old.

It is selfish but I long to go to my own home. To sit and read with May, to indulge in friendship and laughter, and find a cat for the back parlor, and hear no more of mercury or madness or disease or death, save at the safe remove of the news-sheets.

With R's passing, though, it is strange, but the spiders and other small vermin of the house have returned, one had even laid her little eggs in a purse in the curtains above R's bed, as I found when I took them down to air. I suppose RM must have been right that the mercury drove them away. And though they are pests, yet the household feels somehow more wholesome with them present.

 

_And last, from a later volume of the same lady's diary, bound in brown leather, there is an entry bordered in ribbons of black ink._

\--The letter that arrived today has followed me home from the clearing of Anne's house. May hesitated to give it into my hand. I do not know if it is sorrow upon sorrow, or a most awful relief. Dr S - I think he is new, and not the doctor we met - writes that my nephew died trying to protect a good woman. If that was so I hope that Anne will meet her baby again in heaven, and both of them free of all that has afflicted them.  
I must close, I am full of tears.


End file.
